


grenade.

by 8sword



Category: Captain America (Movies), Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Croatoan/Endverse, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Demonic Possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 13:42:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6378088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8sword/pseuds/8sword
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(My two soldiers, Lucifer says fondly. Lost in time.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	grenade.

**Author's Note:**

> Please remember that I love Cas. I really do. I swear.
> 
> (I have seven different long fics to be working on. I don’t know where this one came from.)

 

Steve does it for him, even if he doesn't place the guilt on Dean by saying it. When, down on his knees in the dirt, suit and shield spattered with bits of intestine and flesh, he tilts his chin defiantly up at Lucifer and says, "Yes."

He doesn't warn Dean he's gonna do it. Dean sensed it, maybe, from the regret that softened the corners of Steve's eyes; from the gentleness of the hand that ran through his hair and hesitated at the fragile curve of skull behind his ear before dropping away. Dean sensed it, definitely, because he's done the same before, and he didn't try to stop him.

Barnes knows. He knows Dean let Steve do it to keep Sam alive that bit longer.

The first thing Lucifer does in Steve's body is crumple Barnes' arm with a snap of his fingers. The metal screams and things shift inside Barnes' spine. He crumples, jerking, but does not make a sound.

Dean shoots. Lucifer disappears.

The bullet splinters wood off of a tree, a spray of splinters. Barnes' breaths, harsh and ragged.

 

Barnes speaks to no one after that. The metal arm hangs from his spine, useless, irremovable; Cas knots a makeshift sling around it, keeps it from flopping to and fro as he walks, as they ride, the Jeep bumping over cracked and potholed roads. Missions to raid for water, for bullets, for medicine. He helps, he shoots, he does not speak.

Dean does not speak, either.

(That isn't true. He growls. Curses. Shouts at Cas when he's high and when he isn't. Nowhere for all the hatred he feels to go.)

 

Lucifer finds Sam anyways, though. He finds him, and Sam says, _yes_ , and like that Steve is empty.

(The bombed-out hole of the tavern in London. The puffs of white air from his mouth. The numbness of his knuckles around the scotch.)

The fire in the back of his eyeballs. The blood at the back of his throat, and cracking around his lips.

(My two soldiers, Lucifer says fondly. Lost in time.)

His mind cracked open. The cold wind whistling through it. The clack and clatter of wheels on a track, and gunshots in his ears--

Abbadon swoops inside.

(Remember me?)

 

Seven months in, eight. Croats on their tail and Cas gunning the accelerator for all it's worth, Dean shouting expletives over the passenger headrest as he takes aim, and Barnes silent as he picks off one head, another, another, in sprays of gore.

They break through the underbrush in a screech of tires and machinery. The smell of burned rubber is so strong that Dean misses the other scent, at first—

A projectile slams into the Jeep. It ricochets off the frame and knocks the rifle right out of Barnes' hand, and the metal arm from its sling. It flops out like a dead fish, heavy and silver against Barnes' thigh.

An explosion on the ground beside them. The Jeep goes flying, rolling, and so does Dean, tumbling elbows over nose over ass. Leaves and roots into his face; he scrabbles into them, flattening on his belly in the dirt and blinking it from his eyes as he scrabbles for his spare gun.

A hand beats him to it--Barnes, half crouched atop him, snatching the gun from Dean's thigh holster. His shot rings out, and there's an echo like a gong. Barnes breathing hard, and--

A hand scooping him up, slamming him into a tree. The metal arm clanks once, twice, against it before dangling limply.

It's Steve. Smiling kindly at Barnes with black black eyes as the ridge of his palm digs into his windpipe.  Barnes chokes and snarls.

Dean trains his gun on Steve's head.

Steve turns to smile at him. "What's that gonna do?"

"Got a devil's trap on the bullet," Dean says. "Wanna find out?"

Barnes _snarls_.

Steve's smile widens; he laughs. Grabs Barnes' face, caught in its rictus snarl, and presses his mouth to it. Tongue and black smoke.

Then a spray of water. Hissing steam, and Steve yanks back with a roar, eyes flashing black and blue from Holy Water. It's enough time for Barnes to wrench away, to grab Steve's wrists as Dean grabs his ankles, and together they truss him up in Men of Letters cuffs as Cas chants an exorcism steadily from where he stands a few feet away, blood coursing down his face to his chin from a laceration of his scalp.

 

"We can't take it back," Cas says. Neither Dean nor Barnes speak. Abbadon does, in Steve's meat suit, grinning where he sits chained to the ravaged back seat.

"He wants you to kill him," she tells them. "Don't let him hurt anyone else. Don't let him hurt _you_."

"It _wants_ to be taken back to our camp," Cas says. Pupils blown with the things in his blood and his nostrils and his brain. "Dean--"

"Shut up," Dean says.

Barnes says nothing at all, his hand clasped around the gun on his thigh as they bounce back toward Chitaqua.

 

(He returned to wearing the muzzle. It cut into his skin when his mouth stretched to scream. He wore it to sleep, and it woke him before he started to scream too loudly, let him roll over the side of the bed and onto the floor, into the darkness beneath the mildewed bed.

Cas offered him weed for the nightmares, Valium for the shakes. Halcion to sleep. The soldier shoved them away.

The hard edge of respect in Winchester's eyes after that. The soldier could see it in his eyes, taste it in the hard biting kisses trailed down his thighs--never the mouth, never his mouth.

(He threw up in the mask once. Choked, and pulled it off.)

Sleeping on his side after that. Dean against his back, hard muscle and harder vertebrae.)

 

The demon's hand creeping up under his shirt. To the scarred join where metal dug into flesh. It digs Captain America’s long artist fingers under the metal and pulls. Smiling. A sharp pain, the metal being crumpled into a twisted shape, the ridges digging into him.

“Hey!” Dean barks.

The demon smiles but doesn’t let go. The soldier doesn’t stop it. It grips his shoulder and squeezes. The red star bent into the shape of fingers and a palm.

 

There is a way to save Steve.

 

Cas doesn’t want to help. He gets high three times, and drunk four, twice at the same time, until the soldier twists his arm behind him as he lies in a puddle of his own moonshine and vomit, digging his kneecap into the tender spot behind Castiel’s. It is the site of a fracture the soldier bound and splinted himself, hot breath behind his mask as they bounced in the back of a truck, and he feels the knot of poorly fused bone like a vertebrae beneath his weight, ready to be snapped. Cas sobs and thrashes but does not plead.

The soldier eases off. Then renews the pressure.

“Okay,” Castiel pants. His breath smells of bile. “Okay.”

 

The thing in Steve bares its teeth when the Reaper appears.

The soldier says, “Stark?”

Howard lowers his aviator sunglasses to smirk at him. He has a leather flight jacket on, and he smells of high altitudes, a fresh scent like snow that makes the asset’s stomach twist and sick rise up in him.

Stark’s smirk becomes something pitying. The soldier snarls silently at it.

“What?” Dean demands. He can’t see it. “What is it?”

“No one,” the soldier says. To Stark he says, “You know what I want?”

“I do,” Howard says. “It’s got a price.”

The soldier doesn’t say, I have nothing left. He doesn’t say anything. Stark tilts his head, and says, “Accepted.”

The sound of a rumbling engine, and the phantom scent of diesel. Then:

 

The soldier revolves swiftly on his heel.

“Purgatory,” Howard says in response to the unanswered question. His hair is blown out of its gelled ‘do; he tosses a scarf, newly materialized, over the shoulder of his pilot’s jacket. “Colorful, isn’t it?”

The soldier does not respond. The monochromatic landscape of trees and underbrush is like winter but not, naked of snow and cold. It is inhumanly silent; it is silent like the tank when his ears are frozen and he cannot hear the nitrogen hissing into the tank, only see the crackle of ice across the pane as cold bites into his skull and swallows his eyes.

“Some poor chump left an escape route into the damn place,” Howard says. He points at a rock with gray ivy trailing down it, trembling in the faint wind that issues from the black space behind it. “That’s where you’re headed.”

The soldier doesn’t hesitate. He’s been to hell. He ducks into the dark.

(Hell is a bank vault. The light green and sickly, machines beeping around him. Electrodes adhered by gel to his naked quaking belly and chest; sour black metal between his teeth.)

Hell is dark and unimpressive. Things whimper inside barred cells. They are chained. They smell of feces and urine.

The asset strides past them. He does not know what he is looking for. (He knows for whom he is searching.)

 

(Do you know he made a deal with me for you? The thing in Steve laughing with his white teeth and its black eyes. Not how he expected it to turn out, I’m sure.)

(He asked to bring you back, it says later on. Can you forgive him for that? You would rather have been dead than this, wouldn’t you?” The eyes, contemptuous, taking in the crumpled metal of the arm and the gnarled ropes of the scars and the moth-eaten masses of his brain. It is full of rats and piss.)

 

The passage becomes less dark, the way narrower and steeper, firelight flickering across the walls and dwarfing him in the shadows. There are souls trapped in the very rocks here, their half-buried fingers twitching where they protrude from the stone, faces covered by basalt so that only a chin is visible, or an ear, or a terrified darting eye. A screaming mouth.

Then it widens, yawning into a cavernous cathedral. Stained glass window in oranges blacks reds yellows stretch up on either side, and between them, an altar with a crucifix on the wall. A body hangs from the cross.

(end of the line.)

Steve lifts his head. Lank blond hair hanging over his eyes, which are bright and blue and bruised nearly shut. There are nails in his palms and in his spindly wrists. His sternum is a caved-in thing between the sharp lines of his ribs, and Bucky can see his breaths.

 _One two three_ thuds his pulse. _In’n’out, Stevie. One two three._

“This is what my soul bought?” Steve whispers. (the wheeze in his voice.)

Bucky feels things behind him. He turns, and there are bodies. Piled bodies, necks torn open and skulls blown open and intestines trailing and children and babushkas and Howard, his eyes sightless and legs mangled.

Bucky looks back at Steve. Steve is staring at him. Bucky becomes aware of something dripping from his hands. He looks down and there is a gun in his right and a grenade in the left, and guts hang from both of them, dripping onto the floor. Drip drip drip tick

The grenade. Steve’s eyes to it, and Bucky sees the instinct. Knows it.

“Don’t—” he begins to whisper

 

Explosion.

 

Pieces spattered across the stained glass windows. Bucky raises his head from beneath his arms and stumbles to his feet. Crumples back to his knees.

Steve’s ribs. His dog tags. His too-big shoes, stuffed with newspaper balls. They are all strewn across the room, across the mangled bodies, and Bucky is still whole. Bucky is still here.

I died for this?

Spinning. Steve in his suspenders and too-big pants, staring up at him. A big hole in the middle of his chest, his pulsating aorta visible inside, gushing new pulses of blood onto his white shirt as Bucky watches.

Bucky grabs him, closes his hands around Steve’s too small middle. He tries to catch the coursing blood with his palms, tries to stop it with the heels of them, feeling the warm gush against the pulses in his wrists. He picks Steve up and seals him to him, holds him close. Starts to run. Steve’s blood running out of him all the while. Tick tick tick no no no

The fingers grab at them as he runs. Back, back up. The scream following them. His shadow following them. Steve feeling smaller and smaller in his hands. Bucky does not look back. He does not look back.

Bursting out of the ivy.

 

Howard is limp, his eyes empty and dead. A creature holds his body, feasting on his innards. It raises its gore-streaked face.

I need you to do it one more time.

It is smiling. It is still chewing. It is letting Howard’s body slide to the ground and stalking toward Bucky.

Bucky is frozen. Steve is bleeding.

A snarl. A black streak leaping over his shoulder.

The creature slams into Pierce. Tearing open his throat. He falls back, blood spraying like oil.

The creature lands on all fours. She swipes a chalk hand across her mouth and it comes away red. She looks over her shoulder back at Bucky. Her gaze is contemptuous and lethal. It tracks toward Steve. Bucky holds him closer.

she says,

you and I remember very differently

 

The plates of the soldier’s arm groan and scrape as he pries them back with his fingernails. They creak and resist. Then they fall away like scales, revealing red meat beneath, yellow bone. A tendinous mass flayed from elbow to wrist.

Steve is looking up at him. He looks at him the way he looked at James Buchanan Barnes from the cushions on the floor, placed next to Bucky’s bed, as Bucky’s hand trailed down to rest next to his bony shoulder. Just close enough for Steve’s wheezing breaths to brush his knuckles.

Steve disappears in a wisp of blue light. It whooshes into Bucky’s arm.

The flayed site seals shut.

The Widow has been weaving a web. She takes a thread of it in her teeth. Tugs it, and the tapestry unravels. Reveals a black passageway behind.

Bucky cradles his arm and steps into the black.

 

In 2014. Dean is there, blood running from his nose and mouth. He hangs from Abbadon Steve’s fist, the tips of his boots brushing the dirt. His eyes are swollen nearly shut.

Bucky’s arm burns. He lifts his hand away from where he holds it to the scar. Blue light rushes up, hurtles into the air. It hovers high above Steve’s head like a ball of light.

Crumpled on the ground, Cas follows it hungrily. The blue light reflects off Dean’s swollen-slitted eyes. Abbadon parts Steve’s mouth widely as if in a bark of laughter, as if to scarf down a slab of meat. The blue reflects off her black eyes, too, and makes her look almost like Steve.

“Aw, baby,” she says. “Did you think that was him?” She purses her lips into an O; the wisp of blue light struggles and wavers downward, as though being sucked in. “Don’t you know there are shapeshifters in Purgatory?” The wisp of light falls back away, freed from the suck of her mouth. “Real Steve is gone. I _ate_ him.”

Bucky pulls off the muzzle. He says

 

(yes.)

 

 

 

 

In 1944, Abbadon inhabited a young German boy who was scared to die. She dragged his body out of bombed rubble as he screamed. She left the mangled left leg beneath the track of an Allied tank.

Captain America was climbing off of a motorbike. He moved like an automaton. His eyes were distant and empty.

She discarded the meat suit. Its soul guttered out behind her; she ignored it and slid into the sweaty curves of a young pretty nurse in a spattered apron and pinned-up curls who was gulping drags from a cigarette. Trying not to think of how a man’s pinned arms felt straining under hers as his leg was sawed off. 

When the captain saw Abbadon's meat suit crouched over and retching beside the medical tent, his hand was big against her shoulder blades. His voice was low and kind. The meat suit leaned into the gentle touch, and that night, in the dark humidity of a tent, Abbadon whispered promises to Captain America that made his face desperate, his eyes wide, reflecting the black of hers.

He plunged his tongue against hers in a kiss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Alps, a Soviet patrol uncovered a body in the snow.

 

 

 

 


End file.
